Cultural diffferences

Those in the facial recognition and video analytics businesses should take note: researchers at the University of Alberta have discovered fundamental differences in the ways different types of societies express emotion. According to professor Takahiko Masuda, in cultures such as Japan that emphasize emotional control, one looks to another’s eyes for clues to interpret meaning. But in cultures where emotion is openly expressed, such as in western countries, the focus is on the mouth. “These findings go against the popular theory that the facial expressions of basic emotions can be universally recognized,” said Masuda. “A person’s culture plays a very strong role in determining how they will perceive emotions and needs to be considered when interpreting facial expression.” A video analytics system that works perfectly in detecting suspicious Japanese may not be good at identifying Americans.

These cultural differences extend even to emoticons, those childiish smily faces that teenagers and their adult enablers use as a substitute for writing down their feelings.

“The Japanese emoticons for happiness and sadness vary in terms of how the eyes are depicted,” the University of Alberta explained, “while American emoticons vary with the direction of the mouth.” Examples: In the United States the emoticons : ) and : - ) denote a happy face, whereas the emoticons :( or : - ( denote a sad face. However, Japanese tend to use the symbol (^_^) to indicate a happy face, and (;_;) to indicate a sad face.

Bonus application: According to UA, “the results also suggest the interesting possibility that the Japanese may be better than Americans at detecting false smiles. If the position of the eyes is the key to whether someone’s smile is false or true, Japanese may be particularly good at detecting whether someone is lying or being fake. However, these questions can only be answered with future research.”